May 29th, 2020
No content on this page itself — see linked references below.
2 linked references
Moloch
- I was reading The Box by Marc Levinson May 29th, 2020 & May 30th, 2020 which is a book about the story of how container shipping came to dominate (and generate) global commerce
- and found myself thinking about the role that unions have played in fighting Moloch. A union creates a larger unit of people able to coordinate to make a shared demand, so that Moloch (in this case, in the form of the employer) can't divide & conquer.
- However, reading the many many case studies in The Box by Marc Levinson, it seems pretty clear to me that unions are only able to fight against Moloch—they can't actually create races to the top.
- This means they eventually tend to lose, because the largest pressures still come from the downward spiral. Moreover, conflicts between and within unions illustrate that Molochian dynamics can still show up there.
- In the case of container shipping, the longshoreman's unions were opposed to it altogether, but once it was demonstrated how much cheaper it was, it created a clear race where the old shipping methods couldn't compete.
- Interestingly, it's not obvious to me right now whether to characterize such a race as a race to the top or to the bottom!
- The longshoremen did backbreaking labour, but they were paid quite well for it (when they were paid at all) and they had a lot of loyalty and derived a lot of meaning from their work. From their perspective, the various organizations that were shifting to container shipping were selling out to Moloch.
- However, what was actually being lost here? In the short-term, surely lots of longshoremen became unemployed, but this was in part because the unions fought container-shipping tooth & nail right up until they were defeated, leaving the members suddenly with nothing. If the unions had been able to see the change coming and consciously & strategically adapt what they were doing & retrain their people, then something else might have been possible.
- I'm not suggesting this was within the realm of possibility at the time even if the unions had accepted the imminent change to container shipping; the reality was that these low-skill jobs were simply moving out of New York City, whose downtown ports were already becoming unworkable for various other reasons—in addition to the deteriorating physical condition, it was hard to get the goods from inland to the ports. Trucking them through Manhattan traffic was costly, as was the rail lines sending their boxcars on small boats briefly across the bay just so they could be unloaded and loaded onto oceangoing ships. Plus the factories next to the ports were struggling with NYC's real estate and electrical costs increasing.
- Meanwhile in parallel with the Tesla analogy, part of why shipping became way cheaper with the containers is that it actually took way less energy to do! In this case though, the energy saved wasn't fossil fuels but human labor energy, which is a challenging topic—humans, despite what some propaganda would tell you, value working, and moreover need to generate some sort of livelihood. They also need to eat anyway, so it's harder to point at wasted fuel.
Table of Contents
- Update May 29th, 2020 —this table of contents is out of date. Scroll through All Pages I guess (using the sidebar on the left) or search for a topic of interest.